I always felt the higher the level the less the impact but the bigger the credit one will take.
The CEO sets the goal of more mobile connectivity this year. The VPs come up with high level projects. The managers assign the work. The programming team does it. The higher up the lesa the real impact.
Then your impact is limited. Truth is, you need to do high-level thing to influence more people because that is more efficient and valuable use of your time. Implementation is fun and useful and all, but it can't scale beyond certain scale.